Intermedia Helps Stranded OilSave $100K Per Year — “And that’s not even the primary benefit”

The Background

Kevin Finnegan doesn’t want to visit Wyoming in the winter during bad weather.

As the IT Sustainment Manager for Stranded Oil Resources Corporation, an oil and gas exploration firm based in Golden, Colorado, Finnegan is responsible for the productivity of 100 employees in Wyoming and two other drilling locations.

As long as things are up and running, Finnegan can avoid the frigid Wyoming plains. However, the IT landscape Finnegan inherited when he arrived at Stranded Oil was a hodge-podge of systems that included eight separate providers, more than a dozen platforms and countless security holes, reliability issues and ghost users.

“Stranded Oil hired me to ensure IT supports day-to-day business operations from a strategic point-of-view,” Finnegan said. “But after I visited each site in my first month, my number one priority became to fix the things that were broken.”

Company Profile:Stranded Oil is an oil and gas exploration firm

Industry: Oil and gas exploration

Headquarters: Golden, Colorado

Intermedia’s customer since: 2016

Company size: 100

The Challenge

Finnegan was immediately faced with a number of dire tactical challenges.

IT Overhead: too many vendors
“We had eight vendors doing IT hosting, including 8x8, Rackspace, Dropbox® and Carbonite. Additionally, we had 50 virtual desktops and ViaWest for our virtual server farm. With all of these different providers, we weren’t able to achieve the level of control and security that we needed. Not to mention, we had poor support for our end users and six or seven systems for onboarding new employees. It left us scrambling when employees left the company, hoping that we off boarded them from all of the systems that they touched.”

Email: too many platforms
“We had four email domains on Rackspace — one for each location, plus a corporate domain. But each domain had an Exchange server for power users plus a POP3 server for other users. This left us with eight email servers. If you’re going to shut somebody off because they’re leaving the company, you might have to go to three or four servers to locate them. It was very painful. This resulted in a whole bunch of abandoned accounts that we were still paying for.”

Phones: no direct support
“With 8x8, while we could chat with a technician or email a problem in, it felt like there wasn’t anyone I could call directly to resolve issues definitely or expediently. Sometimes their support was OK; however, the hit-or-miss reliability did not match the partnership we were looking for.”

File collaboration: no IT control
We had four main corporate Dropbox accounts, and a lot of employees had free, private Dropbox accounts. We had no clue what existed across the various accounts and how we could manage or secure them. When employees left the company, our IT team had no way of knowing if they took data with them. And if somebody deleted a folder, it was gone.”

Cloud servers: lack of scalability
“We had a half-dozen servers that shared a physical environment with other companies. The hosts had just a 10 gigabit pipe. We’d run out of disk space or things would go into super slow motion. But any time I wanted to make a change, I’d have to sign another contract. I’d have to get their sales person to sign it and wait two weeks to a month before changes were made. The process was simply too slow for our fast-paced business environment.”

With too many systems, control panels, platforms and bills, Stranded Oil had to reconcile the costs from eight different vendors that added up to more than $18,000 per month—or $180 per user.

The Solution

At first, Finnegan explored replacing old point systems with new ones. But soon he started seeing a pattern.

“When I did an internet search for the ‘top 10 cloud VoIP companies’, Intermedia came up on the list. What about the ‘top 10 cloud data companies’? Intermedia popped up. What about the ‘top 10 Exchange email companies’? Intermedia popped up then, too. Intermedia offered 100 percent of the solutions to every one of my IT needs, with a 99.999 percent uptime SLA and no contract or term required.”

Finnegan circled Intermedia on his short list, alongside Office 365™ and a few other providers. However, product selection was just one of his criteria. How about responsiveness?

“In December, over Christmas vacation, I shot out emails to the different providers. I was really interested in who would respond. Well, Intermedia answered my first call on the second ring. The sales person took the time to break things down and explain the comprehensive menu of services, and how Intermedia would organize all of the labor to migrate our data and phone numbers. With other companies, either I got their voicemail or I never received an email back.”

Finnegan also liked that Intermedia didn’t force him into a one-size-fits-all system. “I have 100 people, but they all have different needs. Not everybody has a desk phone. Some people have mobile phones. Half of the company doesn’t really use email. Some people don’t have computers, while others are power users that need to share files and collaborate seamlessly.”

Finnegan knew that Stranded Oil had found its home with Intermedia.

We couldn’t have selected a better vendor than Intermedia. Truthfully, I don’t feel that one exists. Intermedia is the standalone leader in providing all of these services simultaneously — with a savings to us of roughly 40 percent. We’re very happy about that.

Products They Use

AppID, the single sign-on (SSO) solution that works for any-sized business, lets you scale your cloud footprint without sacrificing security or usability. With no infrastructure pre-requisites, it’s easy to deploy. And it’s backed by Intermedia’s famous white-glove onboarding, 24/7 support and ongoing innovation.

Extend rich, reliable calling features that let you sound like a big business—and operate like one. With Cloud PBX from Intermedia, you can preserve capital and slash operational costs. And experience high levels of reliability and complementary migration.

Cloud Server is a highly available multitenant platform that’s architected specifically around superior performance, availability and data protection. Cloud Server is designed to keep you focused on your applications and your middleware. You’ll never have to worry about virtualization, server hardware or datacenter facilities.

The Results

Stranded Oil has deployed almost every single Intermedia service. This includes Exchange Email, POP Email, Cloud PBX, SecuriSync® file sharing and backup, Email Archiving, as well as its Cloud Server application infrastructure. Finnegan is so happy that he recently pitched Intermedia’s suite of services to Stranded Oil’s corporate parent, recommending that all of Stranded Oil’s sister companies adopt Intermedia as well.

Here are just a few of the reasons why Finnegan is so excited:

Simplified management
“Today, when someone comes into the company, I only need to create one account. I have a cafeteria dashboard in which I just check the boxes. ‘This person needs a phone.’ ‘This person needs email.’ ‘This person gets SecuriSync for document management.’ From one screen, I can manage everyone’s accounts, email, phones and files.”

Expert migration assistance
“Migrating 100 users doesn’t sound like much, but there’s so much work that has to be done. Intermedia set up all of our accounts and every one of our users. This was a huge internal time savings to us. We received tons of compliments from both management and end users about how the migration was so transparent and smooth, and there were no problems, glitches or missing data.”

Cost savings
“In the old scenario, I was spending $18,000 a month for all of the solutions and users. With Intermedia, we have a much more robust system that’s way more manageable, reliable, accessible and user friendly — and it’s $10,000 a month. That’s a net savings of $100,000 a year — and that’s not even the primary benefit. The integration of services Intermedia provides has added the most value.”

Groundbreaking technology like SecuriSync
“With SecuriSync, we have file retention and version control. If someone gets a virus, we can bring up another computer for them, click a button and say, ‘Restore all their files from last Monday at 2:06 p.m.’ Boom. It’s just that easy. When someone leaves the company, all we have to do is check one box and we’ve disabled all of their systems and remotely wiped their phone, tablet and laptop.”

The bottom line for Finnegan? “We couldn’t have selected a better vendor than Intermedia. Truthfully, I don’t feel that one exists. Intermedia is the standalone leader in providing all of these services simultaneously — with a savings to us of roughly 40 percent. We’re very happy about that.”

Not to mention, the better Stranded Oil’s IT runs, the fewer trips Finnegan needs to make to Wyoming during the chilly winters.

SecuriSync is either a trademark or registered trademark of Intermedia.net, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Dropbox is a trademark of Dropbox, Inc. Office 365 is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

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Intermedia Unite, SecuriSync, VoIP Scout, AnyMeeting and HostPilot are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Intermedia.net, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. J.D. Power 2017 Certified Assisted Technical Program, developed in conjunction with TSIA. Based on successful completion of an audit and exceeding a customer satisfaction benchmark for assisted support operations. For more information, visit www.jdpower.com or www.tsia.com.